10 Best Picture Oscar Winners That Aged Terribly

Well, the comments section is about to light up. So let’s just state things as plainly as possible. Forrest Gump is not a good movie. For a lot of reasons. But most importantly for the sake of this article, it couldn’t be any more stuck in the era in which it was made. (Fair warning: this entry discusses history and politics.)

Forrest Gump is a product of a 1990s America, where white baby boomers were on top of the world, and so was the USA. The economy was strong, the military was feared, and all those pesky minority groups seemed to have shut up for the time being. Forrest Gump is the self-congratulatory, hypocrisy justifying, baby boomer fairy tale, that America embraced like a warm hug on a cold day.

It doesn’t take a scholar to see that the main message of Forrest Gump is that order should not be challenged, and you should just do what you are told. By just following orders unquestioningly, Forrest stumbles through life until he becomes a transcendently successful person.

In contrast, the characters around him can be truly awful, particularly if they are protestors, and especially if they are female. Compared to Forrest, protestors are violent, achieve no change, live in conflict, and in the case of Jenny, are literally killed because of promiscuity. The message couldn’t be more explicit if this was porn.

After 9/11, two failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Global Financial Crisis, Black Lives Matter, ISIS, and the election of Donald Trump, do you think a feel good myth about following the rules and celebrating the myth of the American Dream would resonate? Of course not.

In 2017, Forrest Gump is quite simply ludicrous.